


Days of White and Grey

by KH Ivywater (khi)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Gen, St Mungo's Hospital, Unresolved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-13
Updated: 2017-02-13
Packaged: 2018-09-24 00:05:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9689867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/khi/pseuds/KH%20Ivywater
Summary: Sometimes he forgets to breathe.





	

He tries to remember that all of the patients wear grey, but it is easier to forget. The walls are white and the sheets are white and the nurses wear white uniforms. From the stories he has heard, it seems fitting that he would be different. They certainly treat him differently: the words he hears are clipped and they never look him in the eye.

"They don't seem to like me much," is what he would say to anyone who asked, but no one ever does.

A nurse brought in a photo album once. The man in the pictures smiled and waved, until the cover snapped shut and the witch made it burn. "You lied to everyone," she said, and turned crisply on her heel.

Sometimes it's hard for him to smile like the man in the pictures.

The other patients receive visitors from time to time; he receives only mail. It swarms in regardless of his wishes (his wishes are that it wouldn't). He learned after the first month to leave it unopened--the red envelopes especially. But even those of a normal color are deceptive in their innocent looks.

All he has to call his own are pages upon pages of hate.

And one of mystery. It was within his first week that he received the odd, black envelope. The paper inside was stark white, marred by dark print, and no doubt this was another person he had dirtied with his treachery.

"I Know Who You Are."

It was not signed.

And so he waits for another black envelope, because he needs answers. He looks every day through his pile of letters (only a pile now, and not a bag). But it has been nearly a year, and still he is in this place, where he pays for mistakes that are (not) his own.

Sometimes he forgets how much time has passed (yet always remembers to be frightened by this).

Sometimes he forgets to breathe.

And sometimes his mind is so far away that nothing hurts at all.  He's in that faraway place when the world changes, in fact. When the nurse tells him, in increasingly aggravated tones, what he has been waiting to hear.  It takes him a moment to come back to his body, to truly understand what she is saying.

"You have a visitor."

**Author's Note:**

> This was meant to be the beginning of a Gilderoy Lockhart/Severus Snape fic, but it was abandoned long ago. I started writing it on February 21, 2005 and gave it a little wrap-up on February 12, 2017 to make it into what I think is a charming gen ficlet with a mysterious, open ending.


End file.
